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Ron Writes

There’s a girl I know, who like so many, records every life event on Facebook. She has made a long series of questionable decisions that didn’t end well. The interesting thing is that every time she begins one of these new disastrous adventures she adds, “so I prayed about it and feel this is what God wants me to do.” She’s not the only one who says things like this. Of course, prayer is a good thing. Jesus prayed before every major decision He made. We all need to pray for God’s guidance. The problem comes when we begin to think that every hairbrained idea we come up with must be God’s will since we prayed about.

It has become the new “what would Jesus do” type of slogan. Once again, who shouldn’t be thinking about whether they’re following Jesus’ example as they make decisions? The rub comes when we begin to think that anything I want to do is what Jesus would do. This is kindred to “I researched this,” or “I studied this” and “feel that the Spirit is leading me” to do such or such. Once again, it’s amazing that the spirit is leading and their study has resulted in whatever it is they wanted to do.

It reminds me of the guy who was on a diet and was trying to stay away from sugar. As he was driving down the street, he noticed a bakery. So he prayed, dear God, if it’s okay for me to stop at this bakery and get a cupcake, please show me a sign by letting there be a parking spot open in front of the bakery. He said, “sure enough as I drove by the bakery there was a parking spot open right in front and I only had to go around the block five times.”

When I was a kid, I had a magic 8-ball, which was a fortune telling novelty toy. Some of you might remember this toy. You would ask it a “yes” or “no” type of question, turn it over, and the answer would float up in the window beneath it. Of course, we soon learned that if you didn’t get the answer you wanted the first time, you could just turn it over again and again until you got the answer you wanted.

No praying, studying, WWJD, or Bible study will ever make something that is wrong – right. Decisions can be hard. There are those who “distort (twist, NKJV)….the Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Pt. 3:16). The goal of prayer as with Bible study is to find out what God has said, not what we can make the Bible say.